Saturday, March 18, 2006

Iranian Writer Released After Serving 6-Year Prison Term [New York Times: International News] 11:09:25 PM    comment []

Bruce Sterling's talk at SXSW (mp3), on the future we're building, the United States as the new USSR, and that we should make no decision out of fear. (thanks, Alex!) 5:03:36 PM    comment []

The spreading meme of IP extremism. Mother Jones has an interesting fun facts about IP list. If there were a brand manager for IP, this would be more evidence of her failures. [Lessig Blog] 5:02:33 PM    comment []

Navy engages pirates. As in the turn of the 18th to the 19th Centuries, so it goes on around the turn of the 20th to the 21st... the US Navy is still engaging with pirates, and not all that far from where they used to do it in the Mediterranean. [Pajamas Media] 5:02:09 PM    comment []

Massive Surveillance in an Online Gaming World. Interesting. [Schneier on Security] 5:02:01 PM    comment []

Darwin's 1st tree-of-life sketch (pic via Tufte) .... Darwin's 1st tree-of-life sketch (pic via Tufte) [robot wisdom weblog] 5:01:35 PM    comment []

The Pirate Bay: Here to Stay?. The entertainment industry claims it has file-sharing sites on the run. But Sweden-based torrent tracker The Pirate Bay says it isn't going anywhere. And there's a national movement behind the site. By Ann Harrison. [Wired News: Top Stories] 5:01:28 PM    comment []

"be surprising yet self-evident" - Walter Murch. This is a follow-up to yesterday's ultra-fast release cycles and the new plane post. Being an advocate for NOT responding to every user feature request, I have tried to parse Skyler's words carefully. She said, "myspace keeps doing what everybody... [Creating Passionate Users] 5:01:24 PM    comment []

Zing! (Slightly Paraphrased). While chasing links for a religion-in-politics post that may or may not get posted (my opinions on the subject are aggressively moderate, and while I could use the traffic, I don't know that I want the headache), I ran across the swear-to-uphold quote again. PZ cites an unsourced blog post for the story, reproduced in its entirety here: On Wednesday, March 1st, 2006, in Annapolis at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at AU, was requested to testify. At the end of his testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said: "Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman. What do you have to say about that?" Raskin replied: "Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." The room erupted into applause. It's a fantastic line, but it seems a little too good to be true. In particular, the fact that it supposedly occurred on March 1, but didn't get posted to Gather until the 11th made me wonder if it was an urban legend. So I hit Google... (More after the cut...) [Uncertain Principles] 5:01:14 PM    comment []

A Students, B Movies. The American Film Institute has been teaching government scientists how to write convincing screenplays in the hopes of recruiting young people to the science field. The reviews are in, and a box office guru assesses their chance for success. By Erin Biba from Wired magazine. [Wired News: Top Stories] 10:08:56 AM    comment []

1000 books most libraries own (vvphat-1pg via sysr .... 1000 books most libraries own (vvphat-1pg via sysrick) [robot wisdom weblog] 10:08:52 AM    comment []